New Year’s Reading Resolutions

When it comes to resolutions for the New Year, most people focus on their physical health – lose weight, exercise more, eat healthy food.  What about your reading health?  Are you an avid reader or an occasional one?  Do you read only newspapers?  Do you read only fiction?  Only biographies?  Only romance?

Now is a good time to shake up your reading habits and expand your horizons.   The Internet offers a wide variety of reading challenges for the New Year and some examples are listed below.  Try one out and see if it works for you.  If it doesn’t, try another one.  Go easy on yourself.  Set realistic reading goals to keep your mind and spirit active in the New Year.

Read the classics.  Did you skip some of the classics in high school in favor of popular titles?  This is a good time to catch up.  You’ll be glad you did.

Try out a new genre.  Branch out.  Read a mystery instead of a romance novel.  Read a non-fiction title about one of your favorite (or least favorite) subjects.  Push yourself to read outside your comfort zone. 

Create fun monthly or yearly challenges.  Read a book about each U. S. President this year or all of Agatha Christie’s novels – even all of Shakespeare’s plays.  Search the Internet for things like “50 Novels Featuring Famous Authors as Characters” or “Around the World in 80 Books” to find fun, yet different types of books to read.

Write brief reviews of what you read.  Share your thoughts with others.  Join www.goodreads.com and write a one or two sentence review about the books you’ve read.  Book reviews can be as long or short as you want them to be.  The important thing is to share.

Join a book club – in person or online.  The Roswell library offers two books clubs, Noonday Nosh (general fiction and non-fiction) and the Mystery Readers’ Book Club.   Most libraries offer book clubs.  Join www.goodreads.com and search for groups that read similar genres (or challenge yourself to find a new genre to read).

Read the best books of 2014.  At year’s end, websites, magazines and newspapers recommend the best books of the year. Type the words “best books of 2014” into a search engine like Google or Yahoo and see what appears.  Take a look, read a few and see if you agree. 

The suggestions above are just a few ways to begin your reading year with a new twist. Whether you make a reading resolution or not (or keep it or not), always remember the most important thing is … to read.  Library staff are always happy to help you find books to read.  Just ask them.